He dismounted on the cobbled area before the house and looked about, hoping to find one of the family. It seemed likely that the household would be sitting down to eat as well, and he had no wish to interrupt the meal. To his relief, Mistress Lithgo appeared at the door of her stillroom, and came to meet him.
‘Maister Cunningham,’ she said, and nodded in answer to his greeting. ‘What brings you here? Can we do aught for you? Will you stay for a bite?’
‘No, no, I won’t stay,’ he said. ‘I want to get to Blackness today. I met your daughter Bel all on her own over the hill yonder, and thought I should let you know where she was.’
‘On her own,’ she said, sounding annoyed. ‘She will go off like that on her grandam’s errands, and I canny teach her it’s no safe at her age. My thanks, sir. I’ll send her brother after her. And my thanks to your lady mother,’ she added, ‘for his bed and dole last night. He came in an hour or two since.’
‘My dear, you needny trouble about Bel,’ said Arbella’s sweet voice. Gil turned, to see her emerging from the building Phemie had identified as the mine office. ‘I sent her to gather what we need for the spring tonic. She’ll not go far, she’ll be quite safe.’ She approached, leaning on a stick and moving carefully on her high wooden pattens. Her plaid, hitched up over her wired headdress against the rain, hung down in dark folds to her knees, and under it her other hand held her petticoats up out of the grey-black mud. She looked like a mourner at a funeral. ‘But it was right kind of you to let us know,’ she added, smiling at Gil. ‘Was that all that brought you here? I hope you’ve not rid out of your way for my wee lassie?’
‘I was concerned for her,’ he explained. ‘I stopped to speak to her, and something I said annoyed her and she marched off down the burn towards the low shielings.’
Bel’s mother gave him a raking glance, then visibly relaxed.
‘Aye, times she’s like that,’ she admitted. ‘She angers easily, with not being able to say what she wants.’
‘We’d managed fine up to that. She told me clearly how you’d sent her with a gift for Murray just before he left here, madam.’
Arbella’s finely drawn eyebrows rose. ‘Did she so? You’re perceptive, Maister Cunningham, if you grasped that from her. And are you any nearer finding Thomas for us? To tell truth, since my dear Joanna’s out of hearing, I’m beginning to be a wee bit concerned that we’ve heard nothing.’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I’m on my way to Blackness now, to track down your two sinkers. The word in Forth is that they’ve gone over there to their kin — ’
‘Aye, William Wood that would be,’ agreed Beatrice, nodding.
‘To Blackness?’ said Arbella. ‘In all this rain? You’re going to a deal of trouble for my household, maister. Can we do anything for you while you’re here? We’re about to sit down to dinner — will you join us?’
‘No, no, I want to get on my road, I’ll not disturb your meal,’ he assured her, and then, as a memory surfaced, ‘I’d like a look inside your chapel, if I might. Fleming said something about it.’
‘Fleming!’ Arbella said witheringly, and reached for the bunch of keys at her belt. ‘I’m greatly disappointed in that man, you know, sir. After all I did for him, to turn and accuse my good-daughter in such a way.’ She began moving towards the little wattle-and-daub building. Beatrice nodded to Gil and retreated into her stillroom again.
‘You did him a favour?’
‘I did. I knew his father well, sir, a good man and a clever, and died here, Our Lady save him.’ She crossed herself, her keys clinking. ‘And so Davy was left without sponsor. It was I persuaded Douglas to give him his uncle’s place.’ She unlocked the door of the chapel and stepped inside. ‘And well he’s repaid me for it, too, one way and another.’ She bowed stiffly to the crucified Christ on the altar, and again to a brightly painted figure of St Ninian with his broken chain, perched on a shelf behind it. ‘Forever trying to direct me in the manage of this place and my family. Would you believe, sir, he tried to tell me my grandson would never make a scholar, and I should give him charge here instead of Murray!’
‘Did he?’ said Gil, in what he hoped was a sympathetic tone.
‘Indeed he did, and here’s my laddie with tales of how his teachers admire his every word. And the man canny even find me a decent relic for this kirk, to keep the colliers and their women here instead of trailing down into Carluke or Lanark wi’ their petitions.’
And how should they bring their prayers here if it’s kept locked? Gil wondered, and looked about him. The little space held only the furnished altar, an aumbry on legs for the Mass-vessels, and three benches round the walls. The altar-linen must be shut in the aumbry, and a shelf below the closed portion held an obvious candle-box, its corners gnawed by hopeful rats. A pewter holy-water stoup hung from a nail by the door. Linked ideas made him glance downward, to find the floor made of neatly fitted slabs of grey-blue stone much like Bel’s slate, which was still in his purse. No hope of returning that just now, he thought; I can hardly hand it to Arbella with that inscription, and get the lassie into trouble.
‘You keep the key?’ he asked.
‘I have all the keys, maister,’ said Arbella simply. ‘There’s another lives on a nail by the kitchen door,’ she added. ‘We keep it locked because there’s no priest here, but our folk can aye get in if they wish.’
Beyond Linlithgow, the way out to Blackness was a well-made and well-used road, with heaps of stones at intervals to fill in potholes.
‘Likely the merchants that use the port keep it up,’ said Gil when Patey commented. ‘Or it’s paid out of the port dues. There’s only the one way up from the shore.’
‘And is it the shore we’re making for, maister?’ said Patey. His chastened mood had not lasted long, and Gil had become resigned to the man’s chatter. ‘Did you say you wanted the salt-boilers? I suppose that would be them yonder where the smoke is.’
‘More than likely,’ Gil agreed, eyeing the dark column leaning downwind from the distant point, across the bay from the square outline of the castle. ‘Since it seems they burn coal. I wonder what it’s like in the castle when the wind’s in the west?’
They rode down off the low hills which separated Linlithgow from the Forth, through the settlement of Blackness itself where the smells of supper drifted on the wind, and on to the shore. Two merchant vessels were drawn up on the shingle, one loading, one unloading, and another lay at anchor out in the bay. Round the three legs of the crane a stack of barrels waited to be swung on board, several men were handling bales of wool out of a barn, and a handful of carts stood by, the carters shouting directions to the shore porters about their loads. The custumar in a long belted gown of black trimmed with squirrel bustled importantly through the activity, followed by his clerk with ink-pot and parchment at the ready.
‘Where do we lie tonight, Maister Gil?’ asked Patey, assessing the distance out to the tower of smoke.
‘Tonight? I hadn’t thought,’ Gil confessed.
‘Aye, I thought not,’ said Patey with a faint resentment, turning to look back at the way they had come. ‘Just if we’re to go back to Linlithgow to seek a bed, we’ll no need to be held up here. The light willny last, ye ken, and it’s turned cloudy again, we’ll ha’ no good of the moon.’
Accosting the custumar got them the information that there were two inns in Blackness, but they didny want to patronize the Blue Bell where all the common mariners lay, they would do better to ask at the Ship.
‘Or you might get a bed at the castle,’ offered the functionary, studying Gil’s horse and clothing, setting it against his lack of a retinue and obviously coming down on the side of his being likely kin or acquaintance of Ross of Hawkhead who held the castle for the Crown.